by Kyle West
We were being overrun.
Regroup behind the ships, I called out. We have one more chance. Make it count.
This would be our last chance, but I quickly saw that we wouldn’t get even that. I felt complete dread as I saw what lay north of the ships, in the direction of our retreat. It was filled with dragons, all flying toward the ships. A pincer attack.
Even after everything we had done, Odium would win.
But not before I’d had my say. It would likely kill me, but I had to try to tether the Radaskim. I had to draw as much power as I had at Haven, only I’d have to hold it all myself. There was no other way. I would be destroyed in the process, but I saw no other option.
But as I reached for the Xenofold, I felt my vision darkening, and my concentration slipping. No matter what I tried, I couldn’t grab hold of it, direct any of its energy toward my enemies. I was not only weakened from the battle, but from my earlier efforts of downing the dust dragons.
I let go of Silence. I was far too exhausted to do anything, save fighting to my last breath.
Chapter 50
But the northern dragons never engaged. They only flew right past us, a mixture of Askaleen and Radaska, well over a hundred of them, all larger and more powerful than anything that had yet entered the battle.
I couldn’t comprehend why they were ignoring us. Were they going straight for the airships? After a moment, though, I knew the reason, just as Shara gave voice to it.
It made my heart swell with hope.
The Elder Dragons are here!
Come, Elekim, came a familiar voice. This isn’t over yet. Let’s kill some Radaskim.
Tiamat.
I turned Flame around to join the advancing tide. Another airship lit up the night sky and started sinking toward the ground. The Elder Dragons let out a collective roar and began their assault. And that assault was furious. The night was drowned with the roars and screams of battling dragons, but most of those screams were from the blindsided Radaskim. They were ripped to shreds by the Elders’ jaws and claws, far more powerful than anything they had yet faced. I flew on the periphery with Flame, knowing he was no longer good for fighting, as wounded as he was. I watched in disbelief as the Radaskim began to flee, hardly even holding their own for one minute. No more airships fell.
It was the Radaskim dragons who were falling now.
Flame let out a high shriek and flew his way toward the battle.
Flame, no!
But he dove in all the same, engaging a Radaskim already being chased by an Elder. The Radaskim was sent spiraling to the ground, crashing into a pack of crawlers that had broken through the Plainsmen’s line.
We were still outnumbered, but things were more evenly matched, now. The battle raged a few minutes longer, the Radaskim being pushed back until there were none left to threaten the ships. And, as suddenly as the Elder Dragons had come, the Radaskim dragons broke, shrieking and fleeing abruptly toward the south, as if recalled by a single order that had reached all of them at the same time. Dozens more fell as the remaining airships, about three-fourths of the original number, fired on the them.
The Elekai dragons congregated around the Elders. Any who bore a rider was cheering by this point. I noticed several dragons close to the Elders bore riders as well.
“Isaru!” I called out. “Fiona, Isa! What are you doing here?”
“We thought you might need some help,” Isaru called back. “We went to Ragnarok Crater after you left yesterday and look who we brought back!”
I closed my eyes, feeling tears form. It was too good to be true. And flying in the middle of the Elders was the Elder King himself. He let out a massive, deafening roar, far louder than any I had ever heard. His black wings were outspread, each large enough to completely shadow a smaller dragon. His white orbs blazed in fury as a stream of Elekai advanced under and around him, a storm from the north.
We charge! he called. This ends now!
He bellowed again, and flew south, leading the charge toward the plains below. The Radaskim dragons were almost out of sight, now, leaving the thousands of crawlers below completely undefended.
Flame screeched and joined in the carnage.
* * *
The battle continued through the night, the horsemen barely holding back against the crawlers, despite new support from the air. Even with all the crawlers we were killing, there was always more to replace them. The monsters were utterly inexhaustible, unlike our own men. For all the valor of the Plainsmen, they were exhausted.
And the Radaskim dragons were not completely out of the picture. Their numbers, greatly reduced, still tried to pick at the Plainsmen anyplace we couldn’t reach in time, withdrawing at the last moment to preserve their strength.
Where are you, Lord Harrow?
We fought on as gray dawn lit the eastern horizon, as snow began to fall out of an increasingly cloudy sky. The morning light revealed just how far we had been pushed back, and that the crawler host extended almost as far as the southern horizon. There were tens of thousands of them. And one by one, we were losing our men. It didn’t matter that five crawlers fell for every one of ours. It was a trade the Radaskim could afford. Even with the Elders help, even if we had decimated their air force, we had only evened things out. Losing was still possible. And perhaps even probable.
But as the sun rose, I noticed movement on the eastern horizon. The eastern horizon, and not the mountains to the west, where I had expected it. I felt my heart sink. More Radaskim? This would be the nail in the coffin.
They were still too distant to see clearly, and a great dust cloud had formed, obscuring their numbers and manner of composition. As time drew on, the Radaskim seemed to fight more furiously and desperately, despite their advantage in numbers.
I soon knew the reason why. From the east, horsemen bearing standards and horns came forward at a gallop, their armor shining in the morning light.
These were not Radaskim, then. They had come to kill Radaskim.
Elekim . . .
I felt the call across distance, coming from the east. A voice I hadn’t heard in months. Elder Tellor?
Though the hour is late, we’ve come, he said. The Eastern Kingdoms stand united.
Already, the army of the east was close enough to see, despite the dust and snow, deploying a long line of pikes, with large contingents of armored knights on the sides. From the distance, it was impossible to tell their numbers, but it was at least as much as we’d had at Haven. Enough to perhaps turn this battle in our favor and end things once and for all.
Below, the pressure eased off the harried Plainsmen as the Radaskim swarm, as a single mind, began to redeploy and rearrange itself to meet the new threat. Immediately, the Plainsmen yipped and screamed as they pushed back against the endless crawler tide, gaining new wind. Each tribe swooped like a whirlwind, unleashing a storm of arrows into the crawlers’ flanks. Those that still faced the Plainsmen were shot down without mercy.
Even so, there were many more monsters waiting in the wings, roiling upon the plain. The swarm was expanding outward, creating a new line to meet the Eastern horsemen that were already charging forward, lances extended, the rising sun shining behind them in a break of the clouds.
I watched as the two forces collided, as the banners charged deep into the roiling monsters, as the force of it shattered and killed countless Radaskim. As the knights wheeled away for another charge, so did the standards they carried: a black wolf on a field of white, a brown bear on a field of green, even a dolphin on a field of pink. There was a clam with two pearls, a copper snake, a wildcat. One was even a Silverwood on a field of black, along with the verdant green and broken manacles of Atlantea.
But one banner I saw carried along the entirety of the line. The upper left corner was a field of blue with rows of five-pointed stars, with red and white stripes covering the rest. It was a flag I’d only seen in the history books of the Sanctum library.
Nabea, Tellor, Samal, and Ret had
done it, then. Not only had they gotten the Eastern Kingdoms to join as one, they had successfully marched them across to the plains to help us in our time of need.
I reached for the minds of all my dragons. Charge! Give them no rest, give them no mercy. Now’s the time to strike! Cut your way to the pass!
As one, the dragons set out, diving into the ranks of crawlers and unleashing hell, with the remaining airships firing from behind.
* * *
The battle wore on for more hours yet, with massive casualties on both sides. The Eastern army was still fresh, and I deployed half of our dragons over there to defend them from the air, since they had no ships or dragons themselves. The pikes, however, were deadly to the enemy crawlers. They formed a single, unified line, poles pointed out, so that nothing could come near without getting skewered.
In fact, the crawlers were all but disengaging from the Plainsmen by this point, instead choosing to focus on the Easterners. The Plainsmen swirled from behind, firing on the fleeing crawlers and thinning their numbers. Some Plainsmen, I noticed, had joined up with the Eastern knights, waving their swords and shields in the air. These ones, I supposed, had run out of arrows.
Get to the pass! I called to my dragons.
They followed me past the swarming crawlers. The pass had been abandoned by the Radaskim hours ago, but now we finally had the chance to seize it. It was vital that Lord Harrow had the space to deploy his own men; as soon as he arrived, we would have the chance to pincer the Radaskim swarm from three sides, and from the looks of it, the Radaskim wanted to break the Easterners quickly before that happened.
The dragons and I made it to the pass in a few minutes, and quickly dispatched the hundred or so crawlers that had remained behind. There were no losses on our side. Looking into the foothills, I could see movement along the road. The army was on its way, snaking down the road that led to the pass, mostly obscured by the thickness of the trees.
The fight continued into the afternoon. I ate the rest of my jerky and drained the last of my canteen, while I allowed Flame to land on an empty spot of the battlefield to rest his wings, with my friends joining me. I could feel Flame’s exhaustion, and his hunger. The nearest xen was miles to the west, in the Red Mountains; he would have to wait until the battle was over before he could feed and heal himself in the ichor springs of the caves.
By late afternoon, the first soldiers from the west began to enter the battlefield. They found a field of slaughtered monsters, but also of horses and men. I couldn’t imagine their shock at seeing such carnage. I swooped low and landed at the front of the force, and was quickly approached by a retinue of horsemen. The leader of them was Lord Harrow himself.
“Forgive our tardiness,” he said. “We were ambushed last night in the woods. Many men died, but we succeeded in pushing them off. I suspect their only purpose was to slow us down.”
“The Eastern Kingdoms have come to help,” I said. “They’re fighting now to the west.”
“Yes, we saw from the hills. And I have more good news. The Novan force has been spotted to the south and is marching north toward the Radaskim. If we but meet them from the west, while they push from the south, then they shall be enclosed from all sides.”
I could hardly process the information. The Novans, too? They had made it through Highgrove, then, but why were they coming to help us? I couldn’t question it, at least not yet.
“Let’s get moving, then. The crawlers have abandoned their position here, so it should be a straight shot to the battle in the east.”
Harrow turned to his nearby captains who sat on horseback. “Deploy the troops. Advance on my signal.”
“We’ll cover your advance from the air,” I said.
I urged Flame into a running start, and he took wing over a pile of dead crawlers. We flew swiftly west, with the hundred dragons I’d taken, along with my friends, following me. I was almost delirious with exhaustion; the running crawlers and flying Radaskim dragons moved as if they were a vision, the sun glinting off their black scales. They turned and flew away at our approach, rejoining with their brethren attempting an attack on the Eastern army’s left flank.
I led the charge against them, the airships being occupied with protecting the Eastern army’s left flank. Already, the crawlers were throwing themselves against the line of pikes, heedless of any danger to themselves. There were still many of them – perhaps too many for the Easterners and us to handle alone. But Lord Harrow and the Elekai were here. If we could just reach them in time, then this battle would be all but over.
More crawlers yet were wrapping around the foot soldiers’ flanks, checked only by the Eastern cavalry on the left and the Plainsmen horse archers on the right. The entire mass of crawlers was making a final gambit to surround and destroy the eastern army before Harrow could strike from the rear.
But the Easterners would hold. About a thousand feet or so from the battle, Lord Harrow raised his sword on high.
And with a shouted command, the combined Elekai, Colonian, Mongarian, and Shen forces charged, most of them on foot. The Elekai pikemen, almost as numerous as the Easterners, formed a long line meant to entrap and slaughter the crawlers within.
The fighting only went on a few more minutes after that. Again, as if of one mind, the crawlers began fleeing in mass toward the south, toward the only opening that would allow escape. I flew Flame in that direction, only to see another army in the distance.
The Novans had come.
Their men spread themselves to form a line to catch the fleeing monsters, a sight too beautiful for words. Even so, some of the crawlers broke free. I ordered the dragons to clip at the side of the formations, corralling the monsters toward the waiting blades of the Novans. The swift Plains horsemen also kept the crawlers in check, shooting down any who escaped the closing noose.
The armies pushed inward, the crawlers too cramped to do anything other than die in droves.
The slaying went on well into the evening. The Radaskim dragons swirled madly, not abandoning the crawlers to their fate. They, too, became boxed in, surrounded by our own dragons and the airships. The four armies each held their own as the box closed in, forming piles of dead crawlers, and in some cases, mountains of them. The crawlers within their prison of dead could not escape, but not for lack of trying. They were even attacked from the air by dragons’ claws, or shot down with volleys of arrows from the Eastern bowmen. The Novan army assembled towers alarmingly fast, onto which they mounted their cannons that scattered shot widely into the hapless monsters, butchering them more quickly than all the other methods combined.
When the sun rose at last, it illumined a grisly scene. A giant mountain of crawler dead, either killed by our hands, or suffocated within the massive pile. It was eerily quiet. Much of the plains were stained violet from their blood. Likewise, hundreds of dragons were strewn about the field, most of them black, but intermixed were human dead, horse dead, and Elekai dragon dead. And of course, there were the burnt-out husks of the airships, including a husk twice as large as all the others, what remained of the Proudwing.
The men, no matter what force they hailed from, were too tired to cheer. All fell where they stood and slept, only the most disciplined taking the time to pitch their tents or build their fires wherever they happened to stand. The Plains People were the most exhausted; men fell asleep on their horses, and those horses slept wherever they stood.
But despite my utter exhaustion, there could be no rest for me yet. I settled Flame near the Eastern army and was quickly approached by a band of horsemen. At their head were my old friends; Nabea, regaled in armor and a long, verdant cape that was bloodstained and dirty, with Elder Tellor beside him in plain Seeker’s robes, while Samal and Ret rode on Nabea’s other side, dressed similarly to him and looking every inch young officers. There were also other men, carrying banners of many colors and sigils, many obviously commanders of their own forces that had rallied behind Nabea.
Nabea approached astride h
is massive black destrier, along with Elder Tellor, Samal, and Ret. All quickly dismounted.
I did the same, sliding off Flame and running to meet them. I didn’t know if it was the exhaustion, or the sheer emotion of seeing them again, or the gratitude at having been saved, but I broke down in tears.
“I sure am glad to see you alive,” Nabea said.
I was too tired for words. I could only hug each of them as my tears became even more hysterical.
The others started to land their own dragons – Fiona, Shara, Isa, and finally, Isaru. The others looked at Isaru in wonder, as if they couldn’t believe he was with us again. Isaru nodded to all of them, not needing to explain that he was well, and that Rakhim Shal was done for.
“There’ll be time for stories later,” I said. “I’ve been fighting for two days straight now.”
It was then that I realized that I was still taking hold of the Xenofold, as a means of giving me energy. Did I dare let go? I decided that it was time. As soon as I did, I felt gravity pull me down to the long grass below. Despite the bright morning sun shining right on my face, I knew nothing more.
* * *
I woke up later to a pounding headache and a ravenous hunger. I looked around to see that I was in a tent with a fire built in the middle with smoke escaping a hole in the top. I had been sleeping on a bundle of furs, with another fur thrown over me for good measure. Looking around the tent, I could see my friends: Fiona, Shara, Isaru, and Isa, all asleep with their backs to the flames.
I found food near the fire – roasted meat, cheese, and dried fruit and nuts. I ate quickly and chugged water from my canteen, which had been refilled while I was asleep. When my stomach was near to bursting, only then did I stop. I wondered for a moment whether I should wake my friends, but I decided not to disturb them. If they were anything like me, they were exhausted, too, and needed to rest.